Join us for the NYC launch of poet Nicole Callihan’s collection of poems, THIS STRANGE GARMENT, on Saturday, March 4, at 144 Montague St! Doors will open for a reception for in-person guests at 6 PM, featuring Fresh Snow Moonwater made by Zoë Ryder White, and introductions and conversation will begin at 7 PM. Books will be available for purchase. Book signing to follow.

Advance tickets end at 3 PM on the day of the event. After that, tickets for in-person attendance will be available at the door until we reach capacity.

Festive attire is requested!

About This Strange Garment

“If I made a list of my fears, it would begin this way,” writes Nicole Callihan in This Strange Garment—and indeed, this collection faces down a barrage of threats. The pandemic seeps under doors as cancer faces off with radiation; physical and emotional pain are ubiquitous. Enduring surgery and treatment for breast cancer while caring for children, the speaker explores mortality and attempts to understand what is happening to her. Nevertheless, her terror does not preclude moments of ravenous hope: “I write the same word over and over, and mostly that word is light.” While she reflects on reconstructive surgeries, Callihan says, “If you say belly button over and over, it’ll start to sound like something else. Like saying hydrangea until it becomes a bomb.” Callihan’s poetry captures the very power of defamiliarization, creating a poetic space where the flower meets explosion and light meets cancer. “I am not the same woman who began this story,” she writes, and I am not the same woman after reading This Strange Garment.

—Jessica L. Walsh, Book of Gods and Grudges

About the Author

Nicole Callihan is the author of This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023). Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), Aging (2018), and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in NELLE, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in the summer of 2019. Nicole has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Bethany Arts. A frequent collaborator with artists and composers around the world, Nicole’s work has been translated into Spanish, German, Arabic, and Russian. You can find her online at her website (www.nicolecallihan.com), on FB (Nicole Hefner Callihan), and on IG/Twitter (@thebluepitcher).

About the Others

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Michael Tyrell is the author of three books, most recently The Arsonist’s Letters. With Julia Spicher (pronounced SPIKER) Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry, The Iowa Review, The New England Review, The New Republic, The Night Heron Barks, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, RE: and The Yale Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a residency at the James Merrill House. As an actor, he is a member of the NYC-based Renegade Theatre Company founded by actors Vincent Pastore and Maureen Van Zandt and has performed in off-Broadway plays, on television, and in short films. Michael teaches writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Time: 7:00 PM EST

Free!

Registration